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The Losers' Club
WHAT IS LOVE? In the game of love, there are winners and losers.
In 'THE LOSERS' CLUB', Richard Perez tries to answer the eternal question.
Set in downtown New York City, 'THE LOSERS' CLUB' tells the story of Martin Sierra, an unlucky writer addicted to the personals.
His journey brings us into the East Village, pre-9/11 - and in contact with Nikki, his dream woman, who remains unattainable romantically yet becomes his friend and confidant during his illuminating misadventures.
Populated with characters and surprises few will ever forget, this energetic, comic novel is as much about a generation (we won't say "X") as it is about a specific time and place.
In 'THE LOSERS' CLUB', Richard Perez tries to answer the eternal question.
Set in downtown New York City, 'THE LOSERS' CLUB' tells the story of Martin Sierra, an unlucky writer addicted to the personals.
His journey brings us into the East Village, pre-9/11 - and in contact with Nikki, his dream woman, who remains unattainable romantically yet becomes his friend and confidant during his illuminating misadventures.
Populated with characters and surprises few will ever forget, this energetic, comic novel is as much about a generation (we won't say "X") as it is about a specific time and place.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
5 people are currently reading
181 people want to read
About the author
Richard Pérez
27 books31 followersInitially published small literary magazines, Richard Perez has also written for The New York Times (a newspaper he doesn't read). His first novel, The Losers' Club (aka: The Losers' Club: Complete Restored Edition) has three foreign translations to date: Korean, Turkish, Italian. PERMANENT OBSCURITY: or a Cautionary Tale of Two Girls and Their Misadventures with Drugs, Pornography, and Death -- his second novel -- also reflects his infatuation with bohemia and willful nonconformists.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
May 26, 2016
NYC may be teeming with people, but that doesn't mean it's easy to meet any of them. With the help of his best friend Nikki, Martin takes a journey through the personals on a quest to find the perfect girlfriend and cure him of his loneliness. Is she one of the eccentric women who answer his ad or could she be someone he already knows?
If it hadn't been set in NYC with wonderful descriptions of 90's East Village and St Marks Place and for some fun film and literature references I probably wouldn't have enjoyed this at all. It was alright until I realized it was going nowhere. The ending felt like it should have happened in the first third of the book, like the rest of the story where things get really interesting was yet to come. I didn't dislike it, I just wanted something to happen. Wasted opportunity.
2.5/5
If it hadn't been set in NYC with wonderful descriptions of 90's East Village and St Marks Place and for some fun film and literature references I probably wouldn't have enjoyed this at all. It was alright until I realized it was going nowhere. The ending felt like it should have happened in the first third of the book, like the rest of the story where things get really interesting was yet to come. I didn't dislike it, I just wanted something to happen. Wasted opportunity.
2.5/5
February 28, 2012
The story is about a down-on-his-luck writer named Martin who struggles not just with his craft, but also with a fruitless quest for love. He signs up for a voice-mail dating service that, of course, turns out to be a dead end. He also does some bar-hopping in a few odd and ostensibly quirky joints, with dismal results.
This book is bad, and not laughably bad, or moderately bad. This book is insultingly bad. I'd like to count the ways, but there are far too many, so I will try to summarize, and as kindly as possible.
The writing, to put it mildly, is weak. Perez's style is hardly any style at all, unless you can call watered-down and clichéd a "style." Even the very few moments of the story that threaten to become interesting are dealt with so clumsily and pretentiously that they devolve into the same witless and lackluster mess that surrounds them.
But that's no mean feat, since the story itself is so contrived that it, literally, sounds as if it were composed of the weakest moments of some prepubescent bedroom fantasy. Martin's past, the women he meets, and his failures at work are all so bland and predictable that they make reading even this rather short book an excruciating chore.
Martin himself is a dull, inactive person. It is nigh impossible to sympathize with this person's struggles since he is so amazingly unlikable. He wanders through the story, wallowing in self-pity, exuding an ennui that is both colorless and uninspired, a textbook case of someone who treasures the miseries they've invented for themselves. The book is peppered with samples of Martin's writing, and considering their quality (think lots of eye-rolling references to dreams, darkness, love, and loss) it's no wonder he's never been published.
There is so much more. Consider the glossary of the Spanish terms that occasionally pop up in the book. Perhaps it's just an attempt at silliness, but the gesture comes across as more self-righteous than funny. Consider the weird, distracting, and (above all else) very dumb footnotes.
I will end by pointing at the novel's attached "Guide for Book Discussion." I normally don't care for these. They seem to say, "Not only is this book so insightful that you'll want to discuss it with others, but its complexity and brilliance also means you won't even know where to start or what questions to ask." I'll grant that some books do fit that description, but The Losers' Club is far, far from it. The questions themselves point out the vacancy of the novel's inner themes. "How does Martin's life fail to meet his expectations?" "Describe Martin's relationship with Nikki."
Or, perhaps most fitting, "In what ways could the central character be considered a 'loser'?" I can think of many, and one of the biggest reasons is that his story is hardly worthy of the telling, especially when the telling is this bad.
This book is bad, and not laughably bad, or moderately bad. This book is insultingly bad. I'd like to count the ways, but there are far too many, so I will try to summarize, and as kindly as possible.
The writing, to put it mildly, is weak. Perez's style is hardly any style at all, unless you can call watered-down and clichéd a "style." Even the very few moments of the story that threaten to become interesting are dealt with so clumsily and pretentiously that they devolve into the same witless and lackluster mess that surrounds them.
But that's no mean feat, since the story itself is so contrived that it, literally, sounds as if it were composed of the weakest moments of some prepubescent bedroom fantasy. Martin's past, the women he meets, and his failures at work are all so bland and predictable that they make reading even this rather short book an excruciating chore.
Martin himself is a dull, inactive person. It is nigh impossible to sympathize with this person's struggles since he is so amazingly unlikable. He wanders through the story, wallowing in self-pity, exuding an ennui that is both colorless and uninspired, a textbook case of someone who treasures the miseries they've invented for themselves. The book is peppered with samples of Martin's writing, and considering their quality (think lots of eye-rolling references to dreams, darkness, love, and loss) it's no wonder he's never been published.
There is so much more. Consider the glossary of the Spanish terms that occasionally pop up in the book. Perhaps it's just an attempt at silliness, but the gesture comes across as more self-righteous than funny. Consider the weird, distracting, and (above all else) very dumb footnotes.
I will end by pointing at the novel's attached "Guide for Book Discussion." I normally don't care for these. They seem to say, "Not only is this book so insightful that you'll want to discuss it with others, but its complexity and brilliance also means you won't even know where to start or what questions to ask." I'll grant that some books do fit that description, but The Losers' Club is far, far from it. The questions themselves point out the vacancy of the novel's inner themes. "How does Martin's life fail to meet his expectations?" "Describe Martin's relationship with Nikki."
Or, perhaps most fitting, "In what ways could the central character be considered a 'loser'?" I can think of many, and one of the biggest reasons is that his story is hardly worthy of the telling, especially when the telling is this bad.
May 23, 2007
appropriately named...
September 2, 2023
Hem etkileyici hem gulduren!
January 27, 2010
Truly a struggle to get through. Amateur-ish, to be kind.
How many people read this book based on an Amazon recommendation?
How many people read this book based on an Amazon recommendation?
March 4, 2010
I also purchased it based on glowing reviews from Amazon...uninspired drivel...i've never encountered a book so devoid of any redeeming qualities.
February 28, 2007
Take High Fidelity angst but instead of obsessing over records you are instead a struggling writer in the East Village. This book is well written with an amazingly accurate sense of humour thinly mixed with intelligent peaks into literature, music and film... A 'love' story of a man who can only find love in the personals.
March 20, 2007
ugh. i only got about 40 pages into this one before I flung it against the wall. This guy is the Bukowski of today??? Whoever wrote that must have been blind drunk.
January 15, 2018
I am of two minds about Richard Perez’s The Loser’s Club, recently published by the small but spunky Ludlow Press. Part of me wonders if this novel is just thinly veiled dreck, while the other part of me thinks I’ve been reading lit-rah-ture for so long I no longer have an appreciation for the grittiness of books like The Loser’s Club. Quite the dilemma.
The Plot
Martin Sierra is a would-be poet living in the East Village section of New York City. During the day he works in a mindless job for a Japanese shipping company, using company time and supplies for copying his poems for submission to magazines. In his studio apartment, Martin has a huge pile of rejection letters that he cannot seem to get rid of. Martin also has a predilection for personal ads--he compulsively checks his personal ad voicemail box and his answering machine at home, just in case a woman calls him. He also browses others’ personal ads and occasionally leaves a message.
Martin is not just looking for love, he’s looking for a life. “Loser” is just the beginning.
Enter Nikki, a bisexual woman in an on-again-off-again situation with another woman. And then there’s Lola, another artsy type who lives with her schizophrenic mother and goes to art school but doesn’t seem to paint that much. Let’s not forget Amaris, a goth-would-be-vampire, with a young son and a soon-to-be-ex-husband to complicate matters. And I would be remiss to not mention Anna, Martin’s deceased mother who had personal problems of her own. At some moments, I thought Anna was abusive; at others, I wondered if she and Martin had an incestuous relationship, but the text remains ambiguous on that point.
Elements of Style
The dialogue and the narration had an edgy feel to it. Perez’s descriptions of various Village nightclubs and bars had depth and a real quality about them. I would be willing to wager that all of the places depicted were actual hot spots in the 90s.
Unfortunately, my praise for The Loser’s Club ends there. Perez seems overly fond of using italics in dialogue—could that be any more annoying? I mean, do people actually talk like that? I’d rather the writer left emphasis up to my imagination to fill in. At times, I felt like I was locked in a room with Chandler Bing.
Edginess and reality aside, the characters, particularly Martin seemed rather shallow and underdeveloped. I suppose Martin had no more than surface knowledge of some of the women and they would seem shallow to him as well, but Martin himself wasn’t very cleanly developed. For a poet, he didn’t seem to write that often; Martin was busier with checking his voicemail and getting drunk at various bars and clubs every night. Or maybe Perez was so successful drawing Martin as such a loser that I didn’t really care about the character at all.
I predicted the entire outcome of the book within the first three chapters--11 pages.
Overall
I suppose this novel would be adequate for beach reading; there’s not a lot going on under the surface. And, I tend to think men would like this novel better than I did. Although I liked Perez’s use of language in and of itself, the plot that he fashioned with it just did not do anything for me.
The Plot
Martin Sierra is a would-be poet living in the East Village section of New York City. During the day he works in a mindless job for a Japanese shipping company, using company time and supplies for copying his poems for submission to magazines. In his studio apartment, Martin has a huge pile of rejection letters that he cannot seem to get rid of. Martin also has a predilection for personal ads--he compulsively checks his personal ad voicemail box and his answering machine at home, just in case a woman calls him. He also browses others’ personal ads and occasionally leaves a message.
Martin is not just looking for love, he’s looking for a life. “Loser” is just the beginning.
Enter Nikki, a bisexual woman in an on-again-off-again situation with another woman. And then there’s Lola, another artsy type who lives with her schizophrenic mother and goes to art school but doesn’t seem to paint that much. Let’s not forget Amaris, a goth-would-be-vampire, with a young son and a soon-to-be-ex-husband to complicate matters. And I would be remiss to not mention Anna, Martin’s deceased mother who had personal problems of her own. At some moments, I thought Anna was abusive; at others, I wondered if she and Martin had an incestuous relationship, but the text remains ambiguous on that point.
Elements of Style
The dialogue and the narration had an edgy feel to it. Perez’s descriptions of various Village nightclubs and bars had depth and a real quality about them. I would be willing to wager that all of the places depicted were actual hot spots in the 90s.
Unfortunately, my praise for The Loser’s Club ends there. Perez seems overly fond of using italics in dialogue—could that be any more annoying? I mean, do people actually talk like that? I’d rather the writer left emphasis up to my imagination to fill in. At times, I felt like I was locked in a room with Chandler Bing.
Edginess and reality aside, the characters, particularly Martin seemed rather shallow and underdeveloped. I suppose Martin had no more than surface knowledge of some of the women and they would seem shallow to him as well, but Martin himself wasn’t very cleanly developed. For a poet, he didn’t seem to write that often; Martin was busier with checking his voicemail and getting drunk at various bars and clubs every night. Or maybe Perez was so successful drawing Martin as such a loser that I didn’t really care about the character at all.
I predicted the entire outcome of the book within the first three chapters--11 pages.
Overall
I suppose this novel would be adequate for beach reading; there’s not a lot going on under the surface. And, I tend to think men would like this novel better than I did. Although I liked Perez’s use of language in and of itself, the plot that he fashioned with it just did not do anything for me.
October 1, 2023
The book is not as bad as the reviewers here make it out to be. It tells the story of a person who tries to deal with art in the metropolis, even in the centre of capitalism, abandoned by his mother, rootless, hopeless, unable to hold on, in the words of oğuz atay.( tutunamayanlar is the book of oğuz atay. It is in Turkish.) The author tried to hold a mirror to Martin sierra. From time to time he succeeded. It was superficial from time to time. Although Martin is an artist, someone who emulates Bukowsky, he is essentially a very childish person. Although there is a deficiency in the dialogues of the book, the loneliness, dreams and fear of abandonment of the Martin character are well handled. If you like the subject, I think you should give it a chance.
September 7, 2020
The Losers' Club (2005)
Molto scorrevole, forse troppo, non fa presa neanche quando parla di argomenti forti come la depressione della madre e la sua mancanza. Più che dell'East Village, di cui mi ha lasciato poco, colpisce la dinamica telefono\segreteria\annunci. Ha degli spunti interessanti per libri e film.
Molto scorrevole, forse troppo, non fa presa neanche quando parla di argomenti forti come la depressione della madre e la sua mancanza. Più che dell'East Village, di cui mi ha lasciato poco, colpisce la dinamica telefono\segreteria\annunci. Ha degli spunti interessanti per libri e film.
August 23, 2018
This is an excellent book on loneliness, isolation, and love. I really enjoyed it and believe others will to especially if you grew up in any urban centre in the 90s.
August 24, 2019
Young, intense, vivid
What I especially liked about this promising first novel is the lack of phoniness and pretension that could easily afflict someone writing about the New York club scene, especially someone writing from such a youthful point of view. While Perez has an aware sense of the style and pretense of the scene, part retro, part hip, part nouveau chic, and part just plain lost, he takes everything at its face value and just "reports." This "reporting" style makes for vivid tableaux and lends psychological veracity to the life of his characters. His protagonist, Martin, one feels, employs the tabloid want ads for dates not because he is incapable of finding his own, but because he has a kind of inner wisdom that is directing him to try something he would not ordinarily try. One also realizes from the very beginning that Martin is not seeing his somewhat Platonic friend Nikki correctly with full vision, that he needs some sort of contrast or enlarged experience in order to fully appreciate her and their relationship.
While at first blush (and well into the novel) it may seem that what Richard Perez really needs is a plot, it really isn't so. True, his plot is as tenuous and subtle as a weave of spider's silk, but it's there; and after one has finished reading, one realizes what has happened, and how what has happened is resolved.
Nonetheless I think that some readers will miss the sense of rising tension and the clear resolution found in most novels, and will wonder if Perez's novel is not just a string of episodes vividly but meaninglessly told. Clearly he has a fine eye and ear and a vivid style as he writes about the New York City club scene in the nineties, and clearly he is the kind of young and expressive writer who might find a plot confining. And perhaps even more so, clearly he has been influenced by the style of the contemporary short story as found in literary magazines in which what happens is as faint as a glance from across the room. But sometimes a writer, especially a young one, will write what he or she wants and the plot will discover itself. I think that is what happened here. Consider this:
In a sort of unconscious/but conscious bit of irony Perez (who really is a gifted writer, plot or no plot) has his narrator describe Andy Warhol's film Trash (1970) as a "loosely structured story centered" on a character who..."stumbles from one listless adventure to the next, hoping to somehow score." (p. 90) And then the narrator asks, "Could this describe Martin's own life?"
Nice. And yes it could describe the life of Perez's protagonist, and therefore it could also describe the structure of Perez's novel and reveal that the author realizes the slightness of his plot. Interesting.
Such inadvertent and semi-intentional revelations about the writer's consciousness are one of the things that make reading novels so satisfying. Martin does indeed wander from one day to the next seemingly without aim or purpose, feeling for what he wants and what he can get. In this sense the story is real because when we are very young we really do not know exactly what we want or where we are going or why. We are discovering the world and ourselves. We follow not only our inclinations and our hearts to see where they might lead, but we also stumble about.
When I was 17 or18 I was like Martin in that I was swept along by events in my life, free from the restraints of school, home and family, in the big city, free to do what I wanted, to make my own life and mistakes, to find true love or not, to work at some job just to pay the rent and keep gas in the car. I met girls but didn't know whether I loved them or just desired them or something in-between. What Martin discovers is the nature of his feelings for one special girl. Nothing is consummated, and we are left to anticipate the future. What has happened (and this is the "resolution" of Perez's story) is, as the novel ends, Martin knows himself better, knows more closely what he wants out of life, and we can expect that he will probably go after it. In this sense Perez's novel falls into the category of a coming of age tale. Martin comes of age, subtly, almost imperceptively after many pages of aimless wandering. This is something we all do, and only later discover that there was a purpose to our behavior that we could discern only after some years had passed.
--Dennis Littrell, author of the mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri”
What I especially liked about this promising first novel is the lack of phoniness and pretension that could easily afflict someone writing about the New York club scene, especially someone writing from such a youthful point of view. While Perez has an aware sense of the style and pretense of the scene, part retro, part hip, part nouveau chic, and part just plain lost, he takes everything at its face value and just "reports." This "reporting" style makes for vivid tableaux and lends psychological veracity to the life of his characters. His protagonist, Martin, one feels, employs the tabloid want ads for dates not because he is incapable of finding his own, but because he has a kind of inner wisdom that is directing him to try something he would not ordinarily try. One also realizes from the very beginning that Martin is not seeing his somewhat Platonic friend Nikki correctly with full vision, that he needs some sort of contrast or enlarged experience in order to fully appreciate her and their relationship.
While at first blush (and well into the novel) it may seem that what Richard Perez really needs is a plot, it really isn't so. True, his plot is as tenuous and subtle as a weave of spider's silk, but it's there; and after one has finished reading, one realizes what has happened, and how what has happened is resolved.
Nonetheless I think that some readers will miss the sense of rising tension and the clear resolution found in most novels, and will wonder if Perez's novel is not just a string of episodes vividly but meaninglessly told. Clearly he has a fine eye and ear and a vivid style as he writes about the New York City club scene in the nineties, and clearly he is the kind of young and expressive writer who might find a plot confining. And perhaps even more so, clearly he has been influenced by the style of the contemporary short story as found in literary magazines in which what happens is as faint as a glance from across the room. But sometimes a writer, especially a young one, will write what he or she wants and the plot will discover itself. I think that is what happened here. Consider this:
In a sort of unconscious/but conscious bit of irony Perez (who really is a gifted writer, plot or no plot) has his narrator describe Andy Warhol's film Trash (1970) as a "loosely structured story centered" on a character who..."stumbles from one listless adventure to the next, hoping to somehow score." (p. 90) And then the narrator asks, "Could this describe Martin's own life?"
Nice. And yes it could describe the life of Perez's protagonist, and therefore it could also describe the structure of Perez's novel and reveal that the author realizes the slightness of his plot. Interesting.
Such inadvertent and semi-intentional revelations about the writer's consciousness are one of the things that make reading novels so satisfying. Martin does indeed wander from one day to the next seemingly without aim or purpose, feeling for what he wants and what he can get. In this sense the story is real because when we are very young we really do not know exactly what we want or where we are going or why. We are discovering the world and ourselves. We follow not only our inclinations and our hearts to see where they might lead, but we also stumble about.
When I was 17 or18 I was like Martin in that I was swept along by events in my life, free from the restraints of school, home and family, in the big city, free to do what I wanted, to make my own life and mistakes, to find true love or not, to work at some job just to pay the rent and keep gas in the car. I met girls but didn't know whether I loved them or just desired them or something in-between. What Martin discovers is the nature of his feelings for one special girl. Nothing is consummated, and we are left to anticipate the future. What has happened (and this is the "resolution" of Perez's story) is, as the novel ends, Martin knows himself better, knows more closely what he wants out of life, and we can expect that he will probably go after it. In this sense Perez's novel falls into the category of a coming of age tale. Martin comes of age, subtly, almost imperceptively after many pages of aimless wandering. This is something we all do, and only later discover that there was a purpose to our behavior that we could discern only after some years had passed.
--Dennis Littrell, author of the mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri”
January 12, 2011
Quick read... kind of romantic fluff... but still well worth reading.
_________________-
From the Back Cover
WHAT IS LOVE?
In the game of love, there are winners and losers. In The Losers’ Club, Richard Perez tries to answer the eternal question. Set in downtown New York City, The Losers’ Club tells the story of Martin Sierra, an unlucky writer addicted to the personals. His journey brings us into the East Village, pre-9/11—and in contact with Nikki, his dream woman, who remains unattainable romantically yet becomes his friend and confidant during his illuminating misadventures. Populated with characters and surprises few will ever forget, this energetic, comic novel is as much about a generation (we won't say "X") as it is about a specific time and place. "It is a book to be savored." —Tim Sandlin, Sorrow Floats, Social Blunders
"A story of youth, very well told, and it dwells in the mind long after a reader finishes it." —Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
"A very beautiful valentine to a time and place almost faded from existence." —Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To
"Funny and endearing—and wisely not so hip as to avoid a good grab for your heart." —Marcie Hershman, Safe in America, Tales of the Master Race
"The Loser's Club is a vibrant and hopeful anthem for all of us 'losers' who choose not to wallow (for too long!) in our despair and who find the will to keep searching."—Heather Lowcock, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Lexington KY
_________________-
From the Back Cover
WHAT IS LOVE?
In the game of love, there are winners and losers. In The Losers’ Club, Richard Perez tries to answer the eternal question. Set in downtown New York City, The Losers’ Club tells the story of Martin Sierra, an unlucky writer addicted to the personals. His journey brings us into the East Village, pre-9/11—and in contact with Nikki, his dream woman, who remains unattainable romantically yet becomes his friend and confidant during his illuminating misadventures. Populated with characters and surprises few will ever forget, this energetic, comic novel is as much about a generation (we won't say "X") as it is about a specific time and place. "It is a book to be savored." —Tim Sandlin, Sorrow Floats, Social Blunders
"A story of youth, very well told, and it dwells in the mind long after a reader finishes it." —Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
"A very beautiful valentine to a time and place almost faded from existence." —Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To
"Funny and endearing—and wisely not so hip as to avoid a good grab for your heart." —Marcie Hershman, Safe in America, Tales of the Master Race
"The Loser's Club is a vibrant and hopeful anthem for all of us 'losers' who choose not to wallow (for too long!) in our despair and who find the will to keep searching."—Heather Lowcock, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Lexington KY
January 28, 2011
The Losers club by Richard Perez
Reviewed by Moirae the fates book reviews.
Set in downtown New York City, THE LOSERS' CLUB tells the story of Martin Sierra, an unlucky writer addicted to the personals. His journey brings us into the East Village, pre-9/11--and in contact with Nikki, his dream woman, who remains unattainable romantically yet becomes his friend and confidant during his illuminating misadventures. A romantic comedy and coming-of-age story.
(Synopsis provided by good reads)
This is the only book by this author I have read. It truly is a coming of age story. I like reading those types of books. While I enjoyed this book, I did find myself feeling like it was missing something, but I can’t quite put my finger on what that is.
The book was not overly descriptive and it had witty dialogue. What I liked most about this book is how it feels like a roller coaster of emotions, there are parts where you will laugh and parts that will make you want to cry.
The book looks like a dark tale, but really, I didn’t find that. It is a quick and easy read which is a great thing, if that is what you are looking for, however, if you like heavier books, then you might want to skip this one.
Overall rating:
*** 3 out of 5 stars
Cover art:
The cover art is nice, but I think it could have been better.
Obtained:
I won a copy from the author on library thing thanks!
Reviewed by Moirae the fates book reviews.
Set in downtown New York City, THE LOSERS' CLUB tells the story of Martin Sierra, an unlucky writer addicted to the personals. His journey brings us into the East Village, pre-9/11--and in contact with Nikki, his dream woman, who remains unattainable romantically yet becomes his friend and confidant during his illuminating misadventures. A romantic comedy and coming-of-age story.
(Synopsis provided by good reads)
This is the only book by this author I have read. It truly is a coming of age story. I like reading those types of books. While I enjoyed this book, I did find myself feeling like it was missing something, but I can’t quite put my finger on what that is.
The book was not overly descriptive and it had witty dialogue. What I liked most about this book is how it feels like a roller coaster of emotions, there are parts where you will laugh and parts that will make you want to cry.
The book looks like a dark tale, but really, I didn’t find that. It is a quick and easy read which is a great thing, if that is what you are looking for, however, if you like heavier books, then you might want to skip this one.
Overall rating:
*** 3 out of 5 stars
Cover art:
The cover art is nice, but I think it could have been better.
Obtained:
I won a copy from the author on library thing thanks!
October 31, 2008
This book has a feel of a self published novel.... guerilla writing. There are doodles, a glossary of spanish terms (I can now insult people beautifully in a foreign language) and despite it being a brand new book, it fell apart in my hands!
The ghost of Bukowski hangs heavily over this book as a young new yorker workers as an import/export clerk by day and trawls the singles network of personal add dating by night.
Obviously written in pre-internet days, pre-9/11, it at times seems very quaint and at other times quite modern. It does have a great sense of place though and New York and the East village sound well worth the traumas of inner city living on a budget.
There is a sense of humour here as his platonic relationship with Nikki leaves him frustrated and then he meets a series of unsuitable new yorkers on an endless streak of dates.
The book wont leave a lasting impression but is a good read none the less.
August 12, 2012
I read this book because someone suggested in the comments on Amazon saying it was one of the best books they've read all year. OMG it was so boring and it never got anywhere its like I was waiting for something to actually happen. It doesn't have a beginning middle or an ending. The story never ever starts. its just really bad writing all together. Don't bother reading this one.
I cant believe all the amazing reviews it has on Amazon and I don't understand how this book has won a prize.
I'm so confused.
I cant believe all the amazing reviews it has on Amazon and I don't understand how this book has won a prize.
I'm so confused.
Want to read
September 16, 2011Martin Sierra is a 'writer' without a single publishing credit to his name (Martin's hero is Charles Bukowski, poet laureate of skid row and famous drunk), and he's getting on in years, feeling trapped in a dead-end job and languishing in an ambiguous relationship with the woman of his dreams, Nikki.
My kind of book.
My kind of book.
Read
May 11, 2007it's a book that captures NYC color, East Village, circa late 20th. century..not the best book about NYC, but its a poignant story about young people trying to stay afloat and find love in the big city.
July 28, 2012
The writing is nothing special, there are some clumsy mechanisms and it's predictable. But it also contains some great humour and lively descriptions of the New York East Village scene. Pleasant, inoffensive, forgettable.
July 29, 2008
The characters were all stereotypes. Irritating stereotypes at that. Only the main character, Martin, had any remotely redeeming characteristics.
This ain't the new Bukowski!
This ain't the new Bukowski!
July 13, 2009
Agree with other posters this was recommended by Amazon. I thought it would be a coming of age novel like an updated Bright Lights Big City in the end it fell flat.
October 30, 2010
As a romantic comedy, I enjoyed it. A+
January 29, 2012
I thought this book was okay. Pretty much about an individual who is trying to find someone and trying to get his writing published.
August 15, 2013
What a drag!!!! Certain parts of the book had potential but in general the story was not a page-turner, especially with such a pathetic main character. :(
May 21, 2013
una stronzata adolescenziale, sciatta e banalissima.
February 15, 2015
Existential angst in the East Village of NYC.
September 14, 2008
enjoyable read but didn't really linger.
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